Today was my second FDP with my crazy professor in Honduras. The day didn’t even start out that great. We all knew it was going to be a disaster from the very beginning. My class was supposed to meet at the bus at 9:45, but customs seemed to take forever to clear the boat so we weren’t allowed to leave until 10:30, which meant that we were already 1 hour behind schedule. We then arrived at FINCA, which is a microcredit institution. Here is how microcredit works: a person needs a loan so that they can expand/start a small business, they then have to pay back the loans on time, a person is in a group with other people and they are basically like a support system. If one person is late in their payment the entire group can lose their “status” which means that they would no longer receive benefits such as lower interest rates, a return at the end of the year, and even health insurance.
There were already quite a few women waiting for us. I guess there was some miscommunication because these women were waiting for us since 9AM! We were going to interview them and see how FINCA has impacted their life. We first had a presentation by the COO (Chief Operating Officer) who told us all about FINCA. Our professor had said that it was going to be a 5 minute presentation but it ended up being about 15-20 minutes L
After the presentation we broke up into what my professor called focus groups. I decided to be in my professor’s focus group mainly because I knew that she was going to be able to do a good job translating, where as the other groups were being translated by students who didn’t necessarily know too much Spanish. This one girl from Mexico led another group so obviously she knew Spanish really well. While we were ½ way through the interviews everyone was getting really hungry. At this point it was 1PM and we had all eaten breakfast at 7:30, so it had been a while.
The interview continued and then we finally finished around 2PM and our professor said that she wanted to get more information about how the microfinance worked or something like that. She asked who wanted to stay, but most of us just wanted to get back on the bus. She also told us it was going to be another 5 minutes, but it took 45 minutes. It was already 3PM by the time we went to get lunch. We went to the city mall to get lunch at the food court. There were mostly American chains for places to eat: Wendy’s, Pizza Hut, Quiznos, Subway, Burger King, Church’s Chicken, and there were a few places that I had never heard of but sounded like Central American Chains.
We only had about 45 minutes for lunch because we were supposed to go back to FINCA and then we were going to walk to 3 businesses from the FINCA office and we walked down some pretty sketchy streets. Even where the businesses were didn’t seem too nice either. People had set up stalls in this old warehouse and they were really small. It was also really hot and stuffy in there too. We were all a little bit nervous about walking around because earlier a group of us were just walking around and we had only gotten about 1 minute down the street when our bus driver had told us to turn around and get back on the bus. They hadn’t told us when we were walking around that the FINCA representatives were well respected and no one was going to hurt us or even bother us because we were with FINCA. I think if they had given us that piece of information we all would have felt a little more secure.
We visited one man who was selling home remedies for basically everything; he said he had herbal remedies that could even cure cancer. We then visited a woman who was selling shoes, she imported shoes from different places and then sold them to people. The last person we visited was a man who had a wholesale leather business. He makes the different parts of shoes and then the parts get sent somewhere to be assembled and then they get sold. They were really interesting businesses to see, but they were in a sketchy area. After we were done visiting these businesses we were all really hot and tired, so we headed back towards the ship. When we got back it was time for dinner, and then we played a game, and settled in early because we were all exhausted.
No comments:
Post a Comment